Online education is a very promising approach to education and is primarily based upon the use of computers and mobile devices for learning, in addition to the use of other more traditional resources. Individual user accounts for students are often used to provide access, to track payments, to track progress, etc., but can be ripe for fraud. For example, students may attempt to share another student's account when each student preferably should use his or her own account. In other words, a student shares his or her valid account with another student who has not signed up nor paid for the service. Or, a number of students might attempt to share a fictitious account.
Account sharing is problematic and detrimental to learning, as account sharing creates a disincentive for the education provider to produce high quality material (due to the monetary pressures of server costs, curriculum specialists, programming time, etc.) and makes it costly for the education provider to continue to provide high-quality, high-time investment resources to students. This account sharing can lead to a proliferation, for instance, of subpar or generalized material. The cost of producing high quality, specialized material is high, and account sharing makes it untenable for education providers to continue to provide resources at a high level. This leads to a “race to the bottom,” in which education providers offer generalized material or material that does not involve significant monetary or time investment on the part of the education provider. This, in turn, affects the student, as the student will no longer receive the high quality service she or he initially anticipated. Furthermore, sharing accounts makes it difficult for the student to benefit from data-driven analytics that suggest the proper material or courses for a student, given the student's usage of the material and the student's performance. The student's learning experience is degraded and does not benefit from the strengths of online education, namely, personalization and quality of content.
In addition to account sharing in online education, account sharing can be problematic in other online areas such as entertainment, work-related video streaming, subscription services (e.g., a single corporate account for a publisher that is shared), accounts with benefits (like free shipping, discounts), etc.
In particular, it can be beneficial to prevent account sharing before it occurs, and also, to detect account sharing after it occurs, assuming that some amount of sharing will occur. Accordingly, improved techniques and systems are desired.